


How to Stalk Your Ex on Social Media When He Doesn’t Even Know What the Internet Is

by ckret2



Category: Hazbin Hotel (Web Series)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Character Study, M/M, Post-Break Up, Post-Episode: s01e01 Pilot, Social Media Stalking, as in 'oh right these people went to hell' Canon-Typical Behavior, like 1/2 sir pent character study and 1/2 alastor as studied by bitter ex sir pent, technically a sequel but reading the prequel is optional
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:41:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22371976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: Sir Pentious could smell Alastor's cooking. Oh, how he hated that. He hated the smell of Alastor's cooking.He missed Alastor's cooking.—It's been over fifty years since Alastor stabbed his back and broke his heart. Sir Pentious has moved on and gotten over him. But—to be clear—he still hates his guts.And he doesn't permit himself many vices, but stalking his exes is one.
Relationships: Alastor/Sir Pentious (Hazbin Hotel)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 140





	How to Stalk Your Ex on Social Media When He Doesn’t Even Know What the Internet Is

**Author's Note:**

> Written to this prompt for @atomicmuffin: "maybe Pen, after the attack on the hotel, kinda lingering around, hiding, while he regenerates a bit since he's too weak to safely leave without his airship or most of his eggbois, and ends up peeking in through a window watching Al and the others, and kinda delving into his angsty feelings about that?"
> 
> Set immediately after the pilot episode. Technically a sequel to [Cold Day In Hell](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21776062) but if you don’t want to read it all you need to know is that Sir Pent & Alastor were allies/friends/almost-boyfriends half a century ago, until Alastor declared he’d just been screwing around with Sir Pent’s head, destroyed all his airships, and ran.

Sir Pentious could smell Alastor's cooking.

There was a breeze curling around the building near the crater that held Sir Pentious's most recently crushed airship, carrying the scents of meat and spices through the purpling twilight.

Oh, how he hated that. He hated the smell of Alastor's cooking.

He missed Alastor's cooking.

Sir Pentious shifted himself stiffly, muscles aching. He'd been flopped face down halfway out of the pit that had swallowed his latest greatest airship, his long tail noodled up in a fissure along the wall to keep him from slipping back down. His upper chest ached from being pressed to the edge of the pit for so long. He'd been half-unconscious for the past... oh... according to his pocket watch, an hour. He tucked his watch back into an inner jacket pocket, slowly dragged himself back on solid ground, turned, and sat on the edge of the pit, staring down into the darkness.

He supposed that wasn't quite the worst curb-stomping he'd received in the last fifty years, but it was probably going to rank in as the most _humiliating_. And from _Alastor_ , of all people. Over half a century Sir Pentious had gotten by without getting wrangled into a fight with him! And the _one_ time they crossed paths when Sir Pentious was already on the warpath and would have looked a coward and a fool if he'd turned and slinked away, it had to be when his airship was already damaged!

Would it have turned out any differently if his airship _hadn't_ been damaged?

Maybe if he'd been able to power up his plasma cannon just a couple of seconds faster...

No. No, Alastor melted into the shadows far too easily for that. Even if Sir Pentious's airship had been fresh out of the shipyard, he would never have landed a blow. He knew that.

If anyone asked, though—if anyone asked, he only lost because the prior damage made his ship malfunction.

What was Alastor cooking? Sir Pentious could smell onions and garlic. That did nothing to narrow it down. He'd probably been cooking since he'd dragged Sir Pentious's airship in the ground, hadn't he. One of those Cajun things that took half a day to cook. He didn't have any _better_ ways to fill his time, Sir Pentious was sure.

The ground trembled slightly as Alastor's abyss began to close from the bottom up. Sir Pentious scooted back from the edge. So much for recycling the remains of his airship. He wondered if he could trick Alastor into giving him access to whatever dimension he'd sealed the wreck away in? Come challenge him again with a throwaway ship, have another one hiding nearby, wait until Alastor had trashed the junker and then use the reserve ship to tow away the remains of the first two... No, no. Too risky. Too labor-intensive. He'd just have to call this ship a loss. Alas, and it was the one with his new pipe organ.

If he didn't know better, he would almost suspect Alastor had something against organs.

The abyss sealed, leaving behind nothing but a jagged crack in the golden cobblestone road.

Okay. Time to take stock. What did he have. He had himself. He had his hat—good, he'd rather cut off his tail than lose his hat. He had a mess of Egg Bois in various states of disarray, from "visibly cracked" to "gently frying on the sidewalk." Only a single Egg Boi was conscious and up, toddling about checking on the other eggs—"Any other ssurvivors?" "Not looking good, Mr. Bossman." He'd lost his best airship, but he'd _only_ lost one this time. Right after an extermination—good—anyone who might want to take advantage of his current setback would be distracted recouping their own losses. And he was... where was he.

He turned and gave the building he'd been threatening a proper once over for the first time since he'd approached it. Ten stories tall and its architecture included a train, an ocean liner, a carousel, and more bas-relief apples than actual windows. That was Luciferian architecture if Sir Pentious had ever seen it. And a hotel, no less? Had Alastor at last gotten sick of crashing on his friends' couches? Had he finally burned his last few bridges?

How long had he been staying here?

And why hadn't Sir Pentious heard about it before?

Frowning to himself, he pulled his pocket watch back out.

Sir Pentious liked to think he was a man of many sins but few vices. The only addictive poison he permitted himself was jealously stalking his exes. (And tea.) Alastor, despised though he was, was no exception. If anything, it was all the _more_ essential for Sir Pentious to keep close tabs on the actions of the Radio Demon, chief among the threats to his eventual rise to power. His haunts, his habits, his friends, his foes—Sir Pentious knew every significant move Alastor had made in the last fifty years.

He didn't know a thing about this hotel.

He tapped on his pocket watch to unlock the screen, glided his fingertip around the edge until he highlighted the map application, and zoomed in on the spot in front of him. There was a little black box outlining the footprint of the building, but no identifying name attached. Either someone had been paid and/or threatened handsomely to conceal this location, or it was too new to show up on the map.

Sir Pentious squinted up at the building. It was an obvious Magne property with massive neon signs and arrows. It had dead trees, dusty windows, rust-eaten smokestacks, and missing shingles. It was neither covert nor new. What was going on, here?

For a moment, Sir Pentious was tempted to slither in the broken front door, find someone, and ask. What was the worst Alastor could do, crush a few more vertebrae? Big deal, they'd grow back. Sir Pentious had seen other people with Alastor, Sir Pentious could ask _them_ about this place. Not the tall pink one. But one of the others.

But then, did Sir Pentious want Alastor to know he was so keen to find out about Alastor's latest distraction?

Sir Pentious clicked the crown of his pocket watch to return to the list of applications, scrolled around to the camera, and held the watch carefully by the edges of the case so he didn't cover the pink mechanical eye on the back as it focused on the mysterious building. A tap to the screen snapped a picture.

As he switched applications, he hesitated over one for a moment, considering calling for a ride share to his nearest safe house. Then he scrolled on. No. It would cost less to buy a plain black tea at the nearest coffee shop so he could wait for an Egg Boi to bring a car. Besides, too many ride share chauffeurs these days were depraved scoundrels who demanded fellatio in exchange for their services, and Sir Pentious was on the verge of being banned from using the service completely if he set one more car on fire.

He switched to one of his social media accounts, uploaded the picture of the mysterious hotel, and fished his stylus out of his watch pocket. He wove along the cobbled road toward the nearest drag of restaurants as he started scribbling out a query in the picture caption, asking for more information about the mysterious hotel. "If you're looting corpses, hurry up and grab what you want," he said distractedly. "We're leaving."

He was halfway down the hill before he escaped the scent of Alastor's cooking.

###

Sir Pentious was contemplating what was probably the worst cup of Earl Grey he'd ever had—it had cost more than a ride share, and he was still debating whether it tasted worse than a blowjob—when the Egg Boi said, "Wow, Boss! Look at this!" He held out a tablet.

Oh, where did he pick that up? Off one of the corpses, no doubt. Egg #23 _knew_ he wasn't allowed to have Internet access, he was even more of a nuisance when he had steady access to those laser snuff films he was into. Sir Pentious snatched the tablet from him. " _Give me that_. You'd better not have dug up some pornographic filth—"

He fell silent as he saw his own photo of the mysterious hotel at the top of the screen—with a mind-boggling forty-one likes and nine comments. Was this his break into the social media big leagues?! He skimmed the likes to see if anyone important had noticed the post—his hopes jumped when he saw Vox's icon, before he realized it was just Vox's bot account that liked every post it could find—then read through the comments, looking for a way to take advantage of this new potential source of online infamy.

His ambition faded as he read through the comments, and had completely vanished by the time he clicked a link to a news article and watched the video.

So. The princess's pet project, was it? All the better that he hadn't destroyed it, he supposed. He didn't put too much stock in the Magne family—they were royalty, sure, and he'd grant them the due respect such a rank demanded, but they weren't _his_ royalty, and he _was_ angling to overthrow them—but on the other hand, he certainly didn't want to start a fight with them before he was ready to. He wasn't sure how Princess Charlotte's dear daddy would react if someone crushed her halfway house for repentant reprobates, and he wasn't eager to find out.

So much for the hotel itself. More intriguing to him was the fact that he'd found _Alastor_ there.

Why?

Had he checked himself in some time after the princess's proclamation aired? Finally gotten sick of the pitiful little life he was living down here and decided to grovel in front of the Pearly Gates for absolution? Ha! Oh, Sir Pentious wouldn't be surprised if he _was_ that bored.

He was _always_ so pathetically bored.

But no—Sir Pentious was willing to bet that this was another one of his little _phases_. He _did_ that, go through phrases—latch on to someone else's project for a few years in the desperate hope that it would amuse him, tie himself up in it so tightly it would come unraveled if he weren't there, and then either cut the strings and run or else tie up the person who had originally been running the project.

He held the leashes of quite a few little unwilling minions because he'd shown up to help them out, talked them into a deal they shouldn't have taken, and now he owned their very souls. (Sometimes Sir Pentious suspected that the main reason Alastor had backstabbed him so much more dramatically than his other former allies was because he'd never shook on a deal that would let Alastor control him.)

And yet, for all the minions Alastor was at liberty to command, didn't know what to do with _any_ of them.

He _never_ knew what he was doing.

That was just how he worked—although the word "worked" implied a basic level of functionality that Alastor lacked.

Project after project, distraction after distraction. Around the turn of the millennium, he'd spent all his time puttering between various nightclubs run by proprietors who weren't willing to admit the Roaring 20s were over. In the eighties, it had been that dotty little cannibal commune he'd tried to settle down in— _hah—_ Alastor, trying to live a _domestic_ life, he must have felt the ennui crawling across his flesh like roaches. Sir Pentious was pretty sure Alastor had spent most of the seventies trying to drown his boredom with bourbon. And in the sixties, his number one distraction had been... Sir Pentious. Sir Pentious and _his_ "pet project" to take over Hell.

Just another one of Alastor's passing hobbies. Another toy to play with until it ceased to amuse him and he broke it.

And now his latest adopted project was Princess Charlotte's hotel, was it. How unfortunate for the princess. Alastor was as likely to try to enslave her as he was to simply pack up and leave in the middle of the night.

Sir Pentious had _warned_ Alastor, hadn't he—that eternity was just going to drag on and on if he didn't start planning his future. Of course he hadn't listened. He'd probably never heeded a word Sir Pentious said, had he? What could a _Victorian era has-been_ who's _too weak to conquer Hell_ possibly know that was worth listening to. Hss.

Well, which one of them was throwing himself at every demon with an interesting idea that was willing to let him latch on, hm? Like a musician that hadn't produced a fresh album in decades but was still desperate to find a hot new artist who was willing to give him a "(feat. the Radio Demon)" credit on one track.

He wondered how long _this_ distraction would last.

He rewatched the princess's proclamation, then started scrolling through the comments. He supposed it was admirable that _someone_ was trying to do something about the annual exterminations, although he would have picked "find a way to kill the angels" as a higher priority than handholding a bunch of sinners through cleaning up their behavior. But then, she _was_ the daughter of a fallen angel; maybe she had some sort of inborn instinct for things like redemption.

He didn't know. He'd never really fussed himself with all the theological figures wandering around Hell—sure, he could _name_ them all, list off their ranks, their families and domains, their enemies and friends and allies and enemies and lovers and enemies, their political positions and tensions and ambitions—but their supernatural traits? Their celestial or infernal aspects? He'd never seen the point.

Most people he'd known who made a fuss over theology did so out of fear that they wouldn't meet the restrictive criteria to get into Heaven. Sir Pentious had never expected nor wanted to be anything but damned—and no matter which set of criteria you were going by, he'd been pretty much guaranteed his spot in Hell the first time he committed a murder and decided he didn't feel bad about it. There was _that_ life goal sorted. So he'd had no good reason to obsess over the _metaphysical_ side of the hierarchies of angels and demons. They were part of the local politics, that was all.

He wondered if a half-fallen angel _could_ grant redemption to the already-dead damned. If so, he'd have to be careful to steer away from the princess and her hotel in the future. But he didn't know.

He wondered if Alastor knew. He might.

Sir Pentious's stomach twisted in a pained knot. He'd missed supper. Had he remembered lunch? He sipped his tea to try to stave off the hunger and wished he hadn't.

He reached the bottom of the comments, scrolled back up to reply to someone speculating on whether a porn star prostitute could really reform (Sir Pentious's opinion: _some_ could, but he didn't think _that_ one), and then started scribbling out a new comment mentioning that he was in possession of exclusive eyewitness evidence that the hotel's second guest apparently seeking a shortcut to heaven was no less a figure than the Radio Demon himself. Oh, he'd love to see what kind of attention _that_ information drew.

A honk outside drew his attention. He glanced up, saw an Egg Boi waving through a limousine window, and said, "That's our ride." He posted the comment and passed Egg #23 back his tablet. "No pornography or I'm confiscating that again."

Egg #23 sighed. "Whatever you say, Mr. Bossman."

Sir Pentious uncoiled from around the legs of his chair, made direct eye contact with the barista, poured the remains of his cup on the ground—"Your tea _sssuckss_."—and slithered out the door.

He slid into the backseat, pulled the door handle shut with the tip of his tail, and tugged out his pocket watch again to send a message to the account that zealously posted location-flagged Radio Demon sightings (for the benefit of over ten thousand followers who were, by and large, eager to avoid him), alerting the account's anonymous manager of his latest discovery. Sir Pentious's claim wouldn't be posted without photographic evidence—that was their policy—but perhaps the tip-off would prompt them to send out someone to collect proof. The account hadn't been updated since late afternoon. It was obvious they'd lost Alastor's trail. Sir Pentious was keen to see them find it again.

With that business taken care of, he flopped his head back, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and sighed. He was tired and hungry. He only had until he got home to rest, though. As soon as he was in his safe house, he had to take inventory of his meager manpower and material resources, reorganize to shore up any new holes in his defenses, and make plans to start rebuilding.

Again.

**Author's Note:**

> Also available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/190417764107/how-to-stalk-your-ex-on-social-media-when-he). Comments/reblogs there are very welcome (as are comments here)!


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